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+# Security Policy
+
+LAMMPS is designed as a user-level application to conduct computer
+simulations for research using classical mechanics.  As such LAMMPS
+depends to some degrees on users providing correctly formatted input and
+LAMMPS needs to read and write files based on uncontrolled user input.
+As a parallel application for use in high-performance computing
+environments, performance critical steps are also done without checking
+data.
+
+LAMMPS also is interfaced to a number of external libraries, including
+libraries with experimental research software, that are not validated
+and tested by the LAMMPS developers, so it is easy to import bad
+behavior from calling functions in one of those libraries.
+
+Thus is is quite easy to crash LAMMPS through malicious input and do all
+kinds of filesystem manipulations.  And because of that LAMMPS should
+**NEVER** be compiled or **run** as superuser, either from a "root" or
+"administrator" account directly or indirectly via "sudo" or "su".
+
+Therefore what could be seen as a security vulnerability is usually
+either a user mistake or a bug in the code.  Bugs can be reported in
+the LAMMPS project
+[issue tracker on GitHub](https://github.com/lammps/lammps/issues).
+
+
+# Version Updates
+
+LAMMPS follows continuous release development model.  We aim to keep all
+release versions (stable or patch) fully functional and employ a variety
+of automatic testing procedures to detect failures of existing
+functionality from adding new features before releases are made.  Thus
+bugfixes and updates are only integrated into the current development
+branch and thus the next (patch) release and users are recommended to
+update regularly.